Erin L. Kelly and Two IWER Alumni Win LERA Awards

MIT Sloan School of Management Professor Erin L. Kelly is one of three winners of the 2025 Labor and Employment Relations Association (LERA) Academic Fellows Award. The award, according to the LERA website, recognizes contributions of “unusual distinction” to the study of employment and labor relations by scholars who have been in the field more than 10 years.

Kelly is the Sloan Distinguished Professor of Work and Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Co-Director of the MIT Institute for Work and Employment Research (IWER). Her research investigates the implications of workplace policies and management practices for organizations, workers, and families with a focus that includes both employee well-being and organizational performance.  

Kelly was one of several scholars with ties to IWER who were recognized in this year’s LERA awards. Janice R. Fine, an alumna of the IWER PhD program who is a Professor of Labor Studies and Employment Relations at the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations, was also a winner of the LERA Academic Fellows award. Andrew Weaver, an alumnus of the IWER PhD program who is an Associate Professor at the School of Labor and Employment Relations at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, was one of the winners of LERA’s 2025 John T. Dunlop Outstanding Scholar Awards, which recognize exceptional contributions by scholars who have entered the labor and employment relations field within the past decade.

In addition, Lukas Lehner, an Assistant Professor at the University of Edinburgh who won LERA’s Thomas A. Kochan & Stephen R. Sleigh Best Dissertation Award this year for his doctoral dissertation at the University of Oxford, had been a visiting PhD candidate at IWER during 2023. Patrick Nuβ, who is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Halle Institute for Economic Research in Germany and who won a LERA honorable mention this year for his dissertation at Kiel University, also visited IWER when he was a PhD candidate.